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Friday, 3 August 2012

Greece Finds the Answer – Arrest All Debtors (If They’re Poor)

Greeks
who owe money to the government which has cut their pay, raised their
taxes and slashed their pensions could find themselves in prison like
this one in England in the 1830′s

ATHENS - Not content with taxing the poor to protect the rich,
Greece is putting the arm on the penniless, starting with the arrest of
an unemployed Cretan father of seven, whose wife was also jobless. He
owed the government 5,000 euros, or $6,130 in back taxes – because
former Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos, who now has apparently
joined the Mission Impossible team and is trying to disavow himself of
his actions – doubled income and property taxes and taxed the poor.
The shameless arrest came the same day that Prime Minister Antonis
“Mr. Bean Counter” Samaras bullied his coalition partners – PASOK
Socialist leader Venizelos and Democratic Left flunky Fotis Kouvelis –
to back down on their demands that the government not impose more pay
cuts, tax hikes and slashed pensions to satisfy international lenders
who want to make sure foreign banks get paid back before starving Greeks
get fed. You could forgive forked tongue Samaras for going back on his
word – repeatedly – because he’s been chasing his snake’s tail since he
first opposed austerity, then supported it, then opposed it, then
supported it and is apparently dizzy.
But Venizelos and Kouvelis, who folded up like a Chinese-built tent,
are alleged Leftists and what they’ve done in supporting the Capitalist
leader is akin to President Obama handing Newt Gingrich a sword to slice
off the heads of the poor because they’re taking up breathing space in
the land of the free and the home of the rich. Republicans, after all,
don’t mind putting the poor on ice floes and letting them drift out to
sea, where they make swell target practice and now Venizelos and
Kouvelis – as former Prime Minister and previous PASOK leader George
Papandreou before them – have betrayed their own principles, if that’s
the right word to use about a politician.
Greece is just picking up on an old tradition because debt bondage
was common in ancient Mediterranean societies, including Greek City
States, so maybe not much has changed. You can be sure that Eurobank,
one of Greece’s big four private banks which makes people who’ve paid
off their loans if they didn’t get a letter of discharge pay them again,
would have had a branch in ancient Athens.
By around 600 B.C., economic crises resulted in so many Athenians being sold into slavery that the lawmaker Solon enacted seisachtheia,
banning debt bondage and letting debtors return to their lands as free
men. But Greeks today have Samaras, who’s buddy-buddy with the banks and
stood by while the jobless man on Crete was arrested while tax evaders
owing the country $70 billion are walking around free and laughing at
the government. And seisachtheia has apparently run out because the poor
soul was told he could have a “job” with the municipality where he
lives, but with no salary, and had to be an indentured servant – slave –
to pay off the debt he never really accumulated but was imposed on him.
Maybe it’s not such a bad idea though because PASOK and New Democracy
cajoled Greek banks into “lending” them $304.8 million – while at the
same time Greece’s political parties were giving themselves $670 million
in taxpayer funding over the previous decade, which explains why party
leaders live in pink mansions. The bank loans are not being paid back,
of course, and never will be because the banks know that unless they
“loan” the politicians money that the government might suddenly decide
they need to be nationalized or face onerous laws.
ATEbank, founded as an agricultural bank in 1929, and now being
acquired by the private Bank of Piraeus because it was losing money
faster than politicians could spend it, didn’t mind “lending” the
political parties $31.6 million last year, knowing it wouldn’t be paid
back. Its new owners, alone with Eurobank, Marfin, and Attica Bank, are
also being investigated for letting themselves be used as a kind of
slush fund for political parties, but no one’s shown up at Venizelos’
door or the Prime Minister’s mansion and arresting them for not paying
back hundreds of millions of dollars because the police are too busy
arresting the poor.BOOK ‘EM, SOLON-O
Greece is $460 billion in debt because PASOK and New Democracy took
turns hiring hundreds of thousands of unneeded non-workers for
generations in return for votes, which makes the ruling political
parties the biggest debtors in Greece, but don’t count on any arrests.
Wouldn’t it be sweet to see Samaras and Venizelos in a debtor’s prison
instead, and, as was the custom in Olde England, forced to pay for their
stay in their cells, although they have so much money they could just
buy the prison and turn it into the kind of country club they prefer.
The United States, where the rich 1% own the country, used to have
debtors’ prisons until the practice was outlawed in 1833 because people
could be thrown in jail for owing as much as 60 cents to somebody. Owing
the government is almost as bad as owing the late Tony Soprano and his
ilk, but at least their loan sharking business was unlawful while
government-imposed poverty is not. Greeks have been protesting, striking
and rioting for two years to no avail over the pay cuts, tax hikes and
slashed pensions that the likes of Samaras and Venizelos – and now
Kouvelis, his crocodile tears notwithstanding – have imposed on people
while letting tax evaders, the rich and politicians escape. Poor Greeks
wouldn’t owe the government as much as they do if the tax burdens were
fair, but rich Greeks don’t pay taxes.
Many Greeks ran up their credit cards during the easy money days
after Greece got into the Eurozone of the countries using the euro a
decade ago but can try to renegotiate with the banks. Until 2008, Greeks
could still be imprisoned for debt, whether they owed the tax office or
banks, before the law was declared unconstitutional after 173 years in
practice, and just in time because there’s really not enough cells to
jail nine million people who are up to their eyes in debt and being
forced to pay back 100 percent of what they owe although their pay has
been cut 30 percent or more.
But debtors in Greece could still yet find themselves handcuffed
because the courts still have the power to put them away in some
circumstances under the vague notion of prosōpokrάtēsē for debts to the
government if it’s a criminal act, although tax evasion apparently
isn’t. The real crime is that the people who caused people to be in debt
to the state aren’t being arrested and being forced to work free for
the people they allegedly represent until the debt is paid off. But
that’s justice, another ancient Greek notion that doesn’t really exist
in the country that created it.